Episode 81 – Bill Rice

Erik Martinez:Welcome to today's episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. Today I have Bill Rice, founder of Kalydeco and Bill Rice Strategy Group on the show to talk about integrating AI into your marketing and growth plans.

Bill is a former Air Force officer, turn marketer, entrepreneur, and strategist. Over the past 20 years, Bill has helped many companies focus on their marketing strategies and sustainable growth. Bill, thanks for joining me on the show.

Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to the conversation.

Yeah, I'm totally excited. It's very cool when I get to see somebody who's been in digital marketing for as long as [00:01:00] I've been. That's back when, you know, like we were talking pre-show, there was no security. Credit cards are coming in the clear it was all crazy.

Yeah, I've kind of been there from the beginning, you know, as the internet was kind of emerging. I was in the Air Force at the time. We were doing some interesting stuff with counterintelligence where the classic intel world was moving to the internet at the same time.

People don't really think about that, but you look at the old James Bond and those sorts of things where you're talking about dead drops and meeting agents and stuff. A lot of that context was kind of moving to the internet - IRC chat and some other things.

And so again, early, early phases late nineties of the internet sort of becoming a viable accessible thing. And then all the way to kinda like. Where my career sort of, dovetailed into marketing in a little bit of a weird journey through counterintelligence, internet security, and then ultimately marketing.

Just to tie off like where we started [00:02:00] when I started getting into marketing I was a part of one of the early internet only banks and one of the developers came to me and at the time we were getting in Yahoo directory. Actually our number one source of traffic was and some people may know Bankrate Bankrate used to their primary business was to do rate tables in newspapers in the business section.

So our primary source of internet traffic. To generate bank HELOCs actually was from the business section of newspapers, and then they would come to our site.

But in the course of this, one of my developers came to me and said, "Hey, take a look at this thing." And he's got his computer. He brings up essentially this white page with a box in the middle of it, and he's like, "yeah, you just put in a key word and it kinda generates the directory listing automatically." Right? Because again, that was our context - you know, Yahoo directory.

And that was Google. So Google didn't exist; it was sort of a fresh thing. [00:03:00] Facebook wasn't even thought of yet.

So anyway, that was the early seeds of my digital marketing. Is this developer saying, "Hey, do you think like we should do?" So of course there wasn't pay per click yet, so you kind of had to earn your way in. In a really unsophisticated way. But yeah, so it's been fun to watch all these sort of from inception to transformation to becoming a really robust, competitive advertising ecosystem.

I find this fascinating. This question is just popping in my head as you're talking about your background and counter intelligence to the modern marketing world where we're really, I hate to say it kind of a surveillance state, right? We are tracking and trying to identify you, Bill, as someone who is interacting with our ads, whether they are online or offline. And trying to piece together your history so we can advertise to you more effectively, message you more [00:04:00] effectively.

Then there's this pushback on the privacy side of people going, Hey, you know, too much about me. Yet at the very same time, I mean, there's study after study. Where people are saying, we don't want you knowing too much about us. Yet, we want you to no us.

Right. We want you to be personalized, but we don't want you to collect any information.

It's really kind of a fascinating thing. And so you see this interesting push and pull of the platforms and the browsers. The platforms saying, "Hey, we're gonna do these privacy safe things." Yet the platforms in particular are in a background building, CDPs and all these tracking mechanisms. They can but they're doing it in a quote, privacy safe way.

Yeah.

Right. And people can't see what we're doing, but I'm doing the air quotes on the privacy

Right, right. Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of interesting threads to pull on there. So just one my journey. Again, a lot of that [00:05:00] counterintelligence and the things that we were doing were in the early days of the internet and how I ended up in marketing sort of makes sense and in a sense that in the early days of what I was doing, was around kind of signals intelligence and looking at communications. Who's talking to who what the volume and frequency of that is, and from that traffic data again, my own air quotes, those traffic data. You could start to draw conclusions about what was happening or where something was happening or who was connected to who.

And so you could look at those patterns and you could start to draw conclusions. That then sort of dovetailed when I went into the commercial sector. Sort of internet security. So again I'm dating myself, but that was the early days of intrusion detection. And what we were doing, again, we were looking at the signal, which in this case is now internet traffic.

We're looking at little packets and little snippets of these packets, and we're looking for little signatures [00:06:00] that tell us, oh, well, there's nobody that should be running that command unless they're up to no good. And so we start to capture that. And again, we would interpret those patterns. To sort of understand what behavior was.

And then we had things like honeypots, right? We would try to get in the middle of that message and you know, sort of redirect it or confuse it or get that behavior to change. And then that sort of dovetailed into marketing.

And in the context of marketing, same sort of thing. Now we're actually trying to present compelling offers, and we're trying to encourage people to act on, their behaviors, their emotions their needs and wants, which are often confused. And so, we're doing kind of the same sort of thing.

That pattern recognition - super important. Being able to look at data and be able to interpret whether or not. What you're trying to achieve is working and those sorts of things. I think there is definitely a correlation from that.

But the other thing - just to wrap up the second part of your thread there, one of the things that's been proven over [00:07:00] and over again, and we even see this back in the intel world, is what people say that they wanna do what consumers say like that they want, right? They want their advertising to be personalized. They want to only see things that they're interested in.

But at the same time, they're somehow like guarded with their privacy - "Like, this is my information." But in the end, convenience always wins.

So if you make it convenient, you make it frictionless enough, which is a lot of what we do in digital marketing to make that behavior easier for them to do - they will.

There's one classic internet security guy that said, "If you offer dancing pigs on the other side of this. People will give you their social security number." Right? So if the offer's compelling enough they'll sacrifice all their privacy. And like I said, this also translated back in the intel, we saw the same sort of behaviors. There's all sorts of what we would call op-sec. So things that you did to have operational security or whatever.

But invariably, [00:08:00] one of the easiest ways for us to kinda do what we did and figure out who's doing what is - 'cause somebody somewhere opted for convenience and went open-air, unsecure channel, right? And we would pick that up.

So at the end of the day, when you're thinking about digital marketing or any sort of marketing, particularly around personalization and privacy and consumers sort of giving you information, always opt for convenience and reducing that friction - and it will convert better, higher. All of that stuff works better. So again: convenient, a smooth, frictionless process will overrule any sort of logic.

Yeah. You know, we did this behavior study and we were really trying to understand, what's the buyer's journey for specialty retailers. Where does it begin? Where does it end? And what we really found was what you just talked about, like it's convenience. It is also a little bit about your personal [00:09:00] relationship with technology.

So we found, and we've mentioned this before in this podcast, we found three groups and there's kind of that group who like, they can't get enough digital. You know, they have every app on their phone. They're on every social media platform. You can find them everywhere. And every client has some of these people.

Right.

And then there's a group in the middle. I put myself squarely in this group, which is the group that, Hey, you know what? We're not uncomfortable with technology. We're comfortable with it, but. We don't want it to dominate and we don't have time, right?

Chances are we have kids, we have jobs or whatever. We have other priorities. And so we can't be in every channel, and we don't want to be in every channel. But if you took us as a group, we represent every channel.

Right

That actually was a surprise to me, because if I really think about it, it doesn't make it really easy to go and advise a client who's really kind of targeting those types [00:10:00] of people.

Right.

It's now about how do we most effectively attack the budget. But then there's the third group, and these are roughly, by the way, Bill one third, one third, one third in our study. That last third is a little bit older, but it's the group that really doesn't embrace digital at all.

Right,

They still want to pay cash. They love going to a retail store. They will use their credit cards, but they will still rather pay cash. And they're being dragged into digital and you can find them in social forums. You can find them in groups that their kids are in, right? 'cause they have to interact, but they don't really like it.

Right,

And they're really resistant to the thing. So I bring that up because we're moving into a new realm of convenience and speed and all the scary privacy things when we talk about AI , right? All those things start to connect and you say, [00:11:00] okay, we're gonna opt for convenience. We wanna be protected. And now we've got these AI tools that are getting better every day

Oh yeah, for sure

And helping us, helping us marketers and other types of businesses and governments identified Bill and Erik very specifically. So let's dive into the realm of AI for a little bit. And one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot is the AI technology as it applies to marketing today. And I think one of the things that I'm seeing as we talk about consumers and marketers when it comes to AI is one, it's not as developed as people think it is.

Yeah,

And is being hyped in the media.

Sure. Sure.

There are some platforms out there finding really neat ways to use AI very creatively, but I've found so far that we're kind of at the beginning of this bubble is like going back to when we were just talking about [00:12:00] early in counter intelligence for you early in e-commerce for me, where we're at the beginning of that bubble.

The adoption curve because of those three groups of people is gonna be longer. You know, the AI tech enthusiasts are all within two years, everything will, all the jobs will be destroyed, everything will be automated. The reality is no.

Early in my career, I was interviewing in the cable industry, and hate to admit it, it was early nineties and the cable industry was talking about streaming in the early nineties. Well, when did streaming really become prevalent? It wasn't until, early 2010s. Netflix really started driving that streaming component, and we had enough bandwidth to do it.

Yeah.

But in the early nineties, they had already these visions of being able to just deliver and bypass the cable companies and all that stuff. It was perceived as a threat and an opportunity. It was really interesting.

[00:13:00] Right,

So now we're kind of at that same pivotal moment. We've got AI technology that I feel like companies are baking in because they want to make sure their customers think they're leading edge. But you know, I'm kind of curious because I'm seeing in the business community adoption of AI at the real peripheral level.

As a set of marketers, "Hey, we're using it for writing." I hear from people I'm talking to that they're using it for a little bit of planning. They're using it for a little bit of brainstorming, but they're really not embracing the technology and its capabilities in really how to grow their business more effectively. And this is one area that I think you have specialized in, like how do businesses grow?

So from your perspective. How can we kind of get over this hurdle of unproven technology and really start to put our arms around the idea that we are trying to grow our [00:14:00] business and what are the best ways? How do we get there? How do we get to that point where we can get the organizations on board to say, okay, we can evaluate any part of our business marketing included and use. These types of tools to help us grow.

Yeah. I mean, it's kind of, a big question. To one of your statements. I think the first thing that I always tell people is just like, you know, relax and breathe for a second. We are in the early days of this kind of burst on the scene probably in the last six months to a year.

Probably most of the people in your audience is like, "Oh, we just heard about chat GPT in the last six months or so." But it's actually been out there for a few years. And so, even that sort of bursting onto the scene the the availability and accessibility of large language models, which again, have been worked on for years, has just kind of hit that moment where there's enough accessibility and it's easy enough and intuitive enough, and they've [00:15:00] created the right form factor to wrap around it and chat GPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, all these permutations to give it sort of something that again, makes it more accessible.

And then to your point. A lot of people still haven't used it. Or if you ask 'em about it, they're like, oh yeah, I played with it. I tried a thing and it didn't give me anything terribly impressive. So I think we are in the early days.

However, I think that you do need to get in there and you need to start working with this technology because it is accessible. And the people that are on that most aggressive sort of growth trajectory are using it in a very constant daily, multiple times a day sort of things. And I'm talking particularly about things like chat GPT or generative AI that's on these large language models.

A lot of it is sort of being forced into our workflow. So, a lot of us spend a majority of our day on Zoom meetings and Google meets and everything, and it's there. And I think one gentleman kind of captured where we [00:16:00] probably should be with some of this technology as it concerns growth and just our operating, particularly in the marketing discipline is Mark Andreesen from Andreesen Horowitz, which is a big vp, our venture capital firm.

And he's been on the early stages of this. He was, people know his name, I mean he invented Netscape, right? So he was the first accessible browser. So it's worth looking at him. The long and short of what he said is there should be an LLM in every room.

And so that's where people are putting these AI agents and these sort of note takers in all of our meetings. And I think that's a good thing. Again, we'll have the debate over privacy and what should be recorded and what shouldn't be. But the bottom line is - and we use this a lot in sales and marketing, if you look back over that analysis, those note takers of that conversation, you'll be amazed at how much of the conversation that you missed.

So if you go back to that note taker and you ask some questions of it about like, what did I miss? Or what was in the [00:17:00] context of sales, what was the client interested in that I didn't seem to take an opportunity with, or I didn't seem to acknowledge? And you'll get a laundry list. There'll be two or three things and you'll look at it and you'll like, was that a thing did we have that conversation?, you look at the transcript. Sure enough.

Again, a lot of times our brain you know, does some different things. It focuses on what we're focused on. We create some gaps. So I think that's a big piece of that is just getting the LLM. Getting chat GPT into your workflow and not necessarily having it do your homework. I say this all the time 'cause the people that had the worst experience or think that it's total garbage are people that went in there and said, "Hey", kind of the classic, high school use of chat GPT, "write me an essay about the Great Gatsby."

Right? And so if you're trying to get it to write your book report it's probably gonna do a subpar job of it. But if you get in there, you give us some personal [00:18:00] experience data sort of angles to take. And then you do that. It can help all the use cases you said it can help you brainstorm. It can help you build campaign briefs. It can help you build out, like in the context of e-commerce, they can write some of the best email sequences. It can give you some of the best, abandoned cart strategies because it does have a lot of experience and context.

And the last thing I'll say on this, just as a caution to marketers especially folks like us that have been in the business for so long is: 20 plus years, what do we do?

If I get a client, I'm gonna go with my bread and butter. Like I've got something that I know works. I've probably seen a lot of patterns. Clients always think they have a different thing, but it's really kind of the same thing over and over again.

But if I go to Chat GPT, it's gonna broaden my spectrum and it's gonna say, "Hey Bill, you haven't tried this in a couple of years, or you haven't ever done this sort of approach, but it's here." Like, maybe you should take a look at it.

And so I've noticed that [00:19:00] in my use of it, it's broadened the spectrum, and then it allows me to use my expertise to pull in some new ideas, some new approaches or think about something in a different way that really works effectively.

So there's a lot of different places and ways that we could kind of talk about how to be effective. But you gotta get in there and get your hands dirty and start using this stuff because it's here and it's being forced into our workflows. And you're gonna be left behind. One of my favorite quotes, I don't know who said it is, "you're unlikely to be replaced by AI, but you certainly will be replaced by someone who's really good at using AI."

So.

Good point. Good point. So, let's take that a step further and talk about myths, because I think there are a lot of myths about AI and leveraging AI technology to improve performance. What are some of the common myths in your opinion, that marketing teams have about incorporating AI into their growth plans?

Yeah I [00:20:00] think kinda like what you mentioned before, there's probably two extremes that get people in trouble. One is just assuming that you can give it your homework assignment or you can give it your marketing campaign and say, "Hey, give me the best PPC campaign, to market this product", and you expect it to give you something that's just gonna be better than anything you've created before and just light the client on fire or light your particular campaign on fire. So that's one is being overly reliant or thinking that it's a silver bullet or the easy button. That will get you in trouble.

And then I think the other thing that gets people is the other end of the spectrum where you completely disregard it. You just say, "Hey, it gave me crap. I'm not gonna try it anymore. I don't understand it, it doesn't make sense. I'm doing fine with what I'm doing." And so I think those are the two myths because it is capable and it gets more capable with every [00:21:00] iteration.

So you have to embrace it. And I think the best way to embrace it - so you avoid some of these myths - is: whatever you're doing today, if you're in the business, you're probably reasonably successful. You have a workflow, you have a process.

So what I tell my team members is: take Chat GPT, or your preferred wrapper on a large language model and have it up and open. And as you're working on a project, use it like an intelligent colleague. Debate with it. Say, "Hey, what do you think of this? This is what I've got. Is there anything that I missed?" Take a look at this information that I got from a client, is what I'm doing commensurate with what they're trying to achieve? Did I miss anything?

It's really good also at interpreting documents. So again if you get some information, let's say you get a voice and tone doc and you're trying to write some emails, like you'll read it and you probably will only get 10 to 20% of it, right? And as you're doing it, you're gonna kind of do your own thing that's worked before and you're gonna leave that out [00:22:00] and then the client's gonna say, "Well, you didn't do this or you missed this."

If you just tell the LLM, "Hey, look at this voice and tone doc. Look at the emails I wrote. How do I bring these together? Or what did I miss? Or how do I write these to be more compliant with the voice and tone?"

We work with a lot of regulated and compliance type industries, financial services, legal and that kind of stuff. So it's great for compliance too. You can write your favorite marketing copy and then you can tell it, "Hey, make sure that I don't cross any lines, make sure that this is compliant." Again, it's really good. So if you bring it into your workflow you're gonna be in a really good place.

But if you just disregard it or the other sort of problem that I see, it's probably kind of in the category of a myth, but there are all kinds of little tools and a lot of 'em are free and they're just simple wrappers where they baked in some prompts and stuff.

Those kind of tools, again, in the quest to find something that's the silver bullet that does everything. So you don't have to be involved, you don't have to have a human in the system, as I always say - those tools [00:23:00] will also really get you into some trouble.

' Cause it will put out some garbage, and if you're not careful, you'll hand that garbage to your client or you'll run that garbage - and you'll have some really negative results. And then, potentially, you end up at the other end of the spectrum where you just disregard it - and then you get left behind. Right?

I think you raise a really good point. With any of these things you gotta, I'd kind of take the trust but verify, meaning test it, right? I was doing a SEO analysis for a client. They got 50,000 SKUs and they're like, "How do we do this faster? How do we do it better?" Classic use case, "We got large parts catalog, we don't have the people resources to optimize 50,000 items. How can you help us?" So I did some research, found a custom GPT in Chat GTP and I ran it that way and then I ran it a different way. And when I got the results I shared it with the client and said, look, none of this is production ready but I want you to kind of [00:24:00] look at the differences and tell me which one aligns best with your business.

And so they took a look at it, and then the next comment was, " But Erik, I really just want you to give it to me in a form that it's ready to go without any editing." And I'm like, " Yeah, no, I don't think you can do that." The editing's actually the easy piece. The hard piece was getting that initial generation in a place that worked for you.

Right,

And so I think the real challenge is that you do need to evaluate the results and say, " Hey, am I getting what I expected?" And put it on that good, better, best scale or does it not even get on that scale?

Right.

So I think that's a really good point. When it comes to e-commerce teams and leveraging AI technology. What do you recommend they focus on first to help them grow their businesses? I mean, at the end of the day, we're [00:25:00] sitting here doing jobs, ideally we're gonna grow some percentage each year outside of inflation and all that stuff but we wanna see meaningful customer growth. We want to see meaningful sales growth. What should a marketing team focus on first with AI technology to enable them to start nudging those numbers in the right direction?

For sure. And you kind of highlighted some really good use case in there. I think particularly as it relates to e-commerce and some other digital marketing disciplines that are really data heavy. So SEO like you said looking at all these SKUs and stuff like that, you're looking at large amounts of data and the best in the business used to be kind of the Excel jockeys that could do a V-lookup and do pivot tables to really kind of quickly sort through this. Now AI is really good at pattern recognition and moving through messy data, categorizing things just like you were talking about with the SKUs, figuring out logical categorizations and those [00:26:00] sorts of things.

So I think the best use of AI on e-commerce teams and digital marketing teams, is really getting it involved in areas where the scale was difficult because the data set was so large or trying to achieve a scale that just human capacity doesn't allow you to do that. So if you're trying to, create 50,000 SKUs and organize them. Just the human capacity to do that task of organization is gonna limit your ability to scale. But using AI is gonna allow you to sort through that part. And then the human in the system, and this is really important, is just like what you said, the human in the system is the creativity.

And this is where really people that use AI well shines over just AI that you just dumped. Use your example again. Somebody that just said, "Hey, look at these skus and dump out a categorization." The client will look at that and say that doesn't represent our business.

But the creative [00:27:00] person who says, Hey, I'm gonna build a prompt that includes. Who this business is, the context of what they're trying to achieve, what the product is, who the audience is, who buys this, why do they buy it? You put all that context, that creativity into the prompt, and then you feed it in.

Then you ask it to categorize, takes all that context. So you've taken out this sort of laborious middle and you've given yourself more time to be creative and then on the output, look and evaluate. And this is a great way to use chat GPT too, look and evaluate the output. Give it feedback just like you might do an employee.

So your process today might be, Hey, I build a creative brief or a campaign brief. I hand it over to my data person, they do all the categorization and everything and try to interpret this, and then I look at it on the output and then I give that feedback back to the data person and say, let's do another run of this data, or let's segment this differently, or do a, different sort of categorization. Well, now you'd [00:28:00] give that feedback to the AI and in a matter of moments it'll recalculate and show you what that alternative reality looks like. And so again, wherever you can put it into your workflow to take out like the hard human capacity limiting parts of your workflow to give you more time for the creativity and the refinement part of the workflow. That's gonna give you a product that you would not be able to achieve any other way. And you were probably delivering in a subpar way before AI.

So. But Bill, I really don't know where to start. Like there's so many things on my plate. You know, I'm a marketing manager for a mid-size company and I've got three employees and 20 agencies that are involved. How do I, where do I, what's the one thing, Bill? Can you tell me just what the one thing is, and I'm being a little bit facetious, but I think some of us feel that way.

I think today's marketers. We were talking about some of this. The simple days before there was [00:29:00] Google and email and launching an e-commerce site

yep.

In the late nineties where you didn't have to worry about cybersecurity or, well, we probably should have.

Right. Security by obscurity was fine at the time.

You know, the fact that we could put up a website and people were placing orders was a, amazing experience. But today's marketers, I think, have so many things that they have to pay attention to. And one of the big things that they have to pay attention to is marketing is a little more aligned with creative in the idea that it is subjective.

Right, right

And results to a certain extent are subjective for all the reasons we were talking about pre-show about how tracking technology works or doesn't work.

So, I said that a little bit facetiously. But let's say you're comfortable, like I've been in chat, GPT, I've used it, I've had moderate success. What's one [00:30:00] thing that I can do tomorrow?

Yeah. I love this question and it's one that I've heard and I give the same advice and it is pretty simple. It's: pay Chat GPT 20 bucks a month and get their tool. And that's where I would start.

And what I would do is I would open it on my computer and I would do just what I described before As I'm working, I get chat GPT's opinion of my work, it becomes sort of the person that I bounce things off of.

And if that's not working perfectly - you're trying to figure out prompts and prompt engineering and all these confusing terms, that's overwhelming you again. It has this nice feature: you can do this on your phone or you can do it on your computer as well.

Hit the actual voice portion of it and have a conversation with it. Some of the best results that I get out of Chat GPT and the ones that feel the least like AI is when I have a conversation with it.

Because it's really good at picking up my voice, [00:31:00] my tone, my approach, my perspective or frame that I'm looking at things because it gets the nuance, just like reviewing the script, these note takers that review the scripts. It's really remarkable at picking up the nuance of a conversation and pulling out some things that you won't have thought of.

A really practical example of this - not to teach kids how to cheat on their writing their essays: so my daughter's in college and we did this kind of little experiment where the assignment was a food class, and they wanted to talk about food and culture and heritage and how it kind of played into your family and everything, and some of the things you remember about food.

As we're doing that, she was supposed to interview somebody and I said, "Hey Rebecca, why don't we do this? Let's record the interview. We're gonna have the conversation, and then let's give it a run at writing the paper. "

This paper that the Chat GPT wrote from our conversation - the [00:32:00] transcript that we gave it - was very nuanced, and it seemed like her. It had personality to it.

It talked about some funny jokes, some funny situations, that I had talked about in some of the food that I love. It captured this story where I love pecan pie and I thought my mom had this like secret recipe and I asked when I was older, " Where does that recipe come from? I wanna preserve it, I wanna have it in the family."

And she's like, "Oh, it's on the back of the karo syrup."

Well, Chat GPT dialogued that thing into this paper. You could feel the humor from the session. And so having a conversation with it and getting your output from that dynamic or that input can really up your game from an AI perspective because it's really good at putting your personality into its output.

You know, I participate in some AI groups and they were talking about it, but we kind of glossed over it. It's like, "Hey, do that." But you just explained in a really crystal [00:33:00] way. Here's a way you can actually change your work. Make it easier on you, and get a really great result.

Because it has all the things, it has the tone, the context, and it will learn. And you know, for those of you who are not using a lot of Chat GPT, like I'm very old school I type everything into it. Or I type into a word docket and I paste it in and it does its thing. But I think what you just gave us is like, here's a non-scarry way.

You don't have to think about writing the prompt. You can just talk and have a conversation and wow, that's pretty cool.

One of the things that really popped out to me in that exercise too, was a lot of times people would like, "Oh, these AI tools don't get the human element. They don't get humor and everything like that." But if you give it examples like we did in the transcript of humor, it's pretty good at emulating your version of humor, right?

And so, all of a sudden, that output - that result - has a really human element and [00:34:00] texture to it because you gave it examples, and they were personal examples.

So I think, at least in the near term, that's gonna be the game changer. 'Cause there are experiences and use of humor and things that are personal to you that if you feed that in - like it doesn't have. It has access to all of the knowledge on the internet, but it doesn't have access to the knowledge in you.

And so, the moment you give it any of that, or you give it - in the context of clients, right? You give it something unique from the client of voice and tone doc where they spend some time, boom.

All of a sudden, now that AI output does have character and does have this human sort of feel to it. But you have to give us some knowledge that's outside of just kind of its general repository.

I think that's fantastic. We just paid for the whole price of admission for this episode. No, that's really awesome. Well, let's pivot. Totally off the AI conversation for a minute. Let's talk about one of the things that you're an expert in is helping companies [00:35:00] grow.

Yep.

I know today you're not directly working with e-commerce, but you've worked with a lot of e-commerce businesses over the years. So from your perspective, what are e-commerce companies doing right today, and what can they do better to grow their businesses?

I think any sort of growth works. Ultimately we're trying to conserve a consumer right. Or an audience. And I think the better that you get at doing that, and it's funny, we just kind of came from AI and teaching it to be more human. We have the same problems with e-commerce, right? When we're building email sequences and abandoned cart sequences and upsells. If we can get more human, if we can get more where that experience feels like you're understanding what I'm trying to do. So I think that's the key source of growth is really. Humanizing the marketing as much as you can.

And you don't have to go crazy with personalization. Too often we do this, when we're making a sequence or we're doing something like this, or we're to [00:36:00] the point of categorizing or displaying content or related sku. Just doing the extra work to make sure that it makes sense and it feels intuitive.

I mean, go to Amazon. If you start looking through something, Amazon gets it right when they tell you there's some other things you might be interested in and load your cart up.

And so, getting some of those elements right, or taking the extra time to make that experience feel logical feel frictionless, feel intuitive and human that's your fastest growth because you're turning one transaction into three or four. Loading that cart up.

You're making sure that if you abandon, or somebody's just using their cart as a wishlist that you remind them that there's reason to transact, right? It's gotten cheaper, or we've got an incentive, or whatever.

So looking for those moments where, again, this gets back to behavior. When you're trying to look at those patterns, you're trying to do the hard work of interpreting what's going on there. Why are they abandoning the cart? It's not 'cause they don't want that stuff. It's 'cause [00:37:00] they're waiting for their paycheck or they're waiting for the credit card cycle to be up.

Or they're waiting for like the one more thing they want or they're waiting for the right price. Or they know if you load it into the cart. Then you'll give 'em a discount if you leave it there long enough. Start thinking through those behaviors. So growth I think really lies in doing the hard work of looking at those patterns, looking at those behaviors and figuring out how you can optimize up that transaction.

It's giving you more monetization, but it's also giving the consumer an easier, frictionless experience that they're gonna enjoy. And they're gonna do it with you again. So, I think that's probably the biggest element and you can leverage AI and some of these other things to do that.

And it's getting easier to do that. But thinking there first, don't just - especially 'cause a lot of us are spreadsheet jockeys. One of the other things that I remind people of is some of the worst decisions looked really good in the spreadsheet. So you gotta come out of that data,

Yes.

You gotta come out of that data and humanize it and look for the patterns and try to think about, what were they [00:38:00] thinking behind the screen and behind the data set. So, that's probably my caution against data. The more you can humanize, look for those patterns, put it in the context of human behavior, the more successful you'll be and the faster you'll grow.

What I felt was fascinating about that whole conversation that you just had was you used the word feel.

Yep.

You used the word behavior

Yep.

And we had an episode at the beginning year with a lady named Jeanette McMurtry and she approaches everything from a neural science perspective. And I think the one thing a spreadsheet jockey's forget is the human emotion that's associated with buying.

Anything, anything. I mean, if I'm buying toilet paper. I probably don't have a great deal of emotion other than you also use the word frictionless, right? Amazon makes it very easy for me to buy that toilet paper or walking into my local Kroger makes it very easy to buy that [00:39:00] toilet paper.

But thinking through what you just described as, Hey, we've gotta get out of our spreadsheets, talk about the human emotions that are associated with a purchase of something. Whatever it is you're selling, whether it's a service or a product, it doesn't really matter. There is that connection component.

So thank you for that answer. Bill, before we move to close, is there any last piece of advice you'd like to leave with the listening audience?

Yeah, I think as you're sorting through all of this there's an element of AI. And even what we do on a daily basis, where we're looking for the easy solution. And a lot of being successful with this is doing the hard work to understand the new technology that's coming in the way that it's changing behavior.

How it's sort of increasing or decreasing the effectiveness of what you're doing. And so the way I always boil that down and I think it's really important, especially 'cause we often work with technology [00:40:00] where that early stage of the technology is trying to just throw at you all of this hype, like you mentioned before, about how easy this is and what a silver bullet it is.

So I always remind my team - hard now, easy later - easy now, hard later. Do the hard work of understanding, getting a deep knowledge maybe using the tools when they're a little clunkier. So that later you'll be that much further ahead and you will have done the hard work that makes life and your output easier and better and faster.

That's probably one core philosophy that I repeat over and over again. That investment of doing the hard thing now, ultimately, in a lot of different ways makes life, business, relationships easier. If you just do the hard work now and then it'll pay off and make things easier later.

I think that's great advice. Bill, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. I could talk to you for hours. We scratched and I squirreled a [00:41:00] little bit at the beginning, but we could talk on so many different topics. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing some of your wisdom with the audience.

If somebody wants to reach out, what's the best way to get in touch with you?

Yeah, there's a couple ways. One I would suggest just for executives, entrepreneurs, founders, and everything a big part of what we've talked about today, and I think about being successful is just keeping up on what's evolving, what's the trends, what's important. And I try to help with that.

I have www.myexecutivebrief.com, which is my newsletter. And I'm. Putting this kind of content, talking about these sorts of things, helping my audience kind of work through these new things in curating that newsletter and a lot of my content comes from there. If you wanna connect with me directly and engage with what I do related to strategy, you can come to billricestrategy.com.

And if you just wanna have a conversation, super active and involved on LinkedIn you can find me there. Lot of content, but you can always direct message me or connect on there. Happy to pick up the conversation in LinkedIn.[00:42:00]

That's awesome. Bill. Thank you again so much for coming on. That's it for today's episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. Thank you for listening to the show. Have a great day.